As 'blue' states go, this one's pretty solidly blue, but emerging from the numbers, there's a bigger story which will probably never see the light of day.
This year, the Washington State Democratic Party elected to allocate all of the state's delegates via the caucuses, and proposed that the state primary be cancelled to save the taxpayers an estimated $9 million, but the state GOP managed to block the legislation by deciding to allocate 51% of their delegates to the winner of the primary. So, the caucuses were a week ago this past Saturday, and the primary- which has been noted pretty visibly in the media to be nothing more than a 'beauty contest' on the Democratic side- was held today.
Most of the state has shifted to mail-in balloting, so results will probably continue to come in through the weekend at least, but enough is in from the early counts to start painting a picture, and it's one which is surprising in how stark a picture it is.
With 53 percent of the precincts reporting, the numbers are fairly close on the Democratic side. Remember that this means absolutely NOTHING in terms of allocating delegates:
Obama 238,998
Clinton 226,672
And on the Republican side:
McCain 176,846
Huckabee76,886
Romney 74,444
Paul 26,590
So, the numbers work out like this: in a meaningless primary, Obama attracts almost as many votes as McCain and Huckabee (or McCain and Romney) combined.
It's probably also relevant to note that because of the vote-by-mail system in use throughout most of the state, ballots went in the mail around the first of the month, accounting for a number of candidates presence on the ballot (mine in King County also had John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson and Joe Biden)- and more notably, before McCain was given the mantle of GOP nominee presumptive.
And, anecdotally, this came during a primary with astonishingly light turnout in King County- one of the ones which hasn't shifted to all vote-by-mail- at the time I took my (permanent absentee) ballot to my polling location at about four this afternoon, the amassed tally for all six precincts which share a common site was a whopping 24- or about a fifth of the turnout for the caucus from just my precinct.